It was time for her to go. Jemima knew that of a certainty. The problem was explaining her presence at the place she was most forbidden to go. She sat and pondered for a moment, what this choice meant for the rest of her life, and went anyway. She entered the lair and gave herself, what little there was of her, into the hands of the tom she had loved at first sight.

She knew he was a cruel master, this mystery cat of hers. But she had also known for a long time that he was meant to be hers and hers alone. Her family was wrong, there was no good inside her, but he was so very, very right for a little queen so lost as she.

And if he often kept her in a prison, it was only for her own good. And if he beat her it was only because she had done some ineffable wrong, which she would swear never to do again. And when he was done re-forging her, she was precisely what he needed, as she had always known she was. He had made her into his most potent weapon.

She burned to please him, and so she did just that. They called her Macavity's Whore, but few knew the nature of her debasement, or just exactly why she was his perfect match. She knew. She knew his secrets, and the subtlest contours of his soul. She was his daughter, after all. And because she knew, he could ask, and when he asked, she would mold her body to his and give him what pleasure he sought.

And each time, she knew she hurt the ones she had abandoned, and did not care. Life had become a dream, a never-ending nightmare of ecstasy that she had been seeking all along. Wound her adoptive father, slay her mother, earn the enmity of the entire tribe, turning them in on themselves and making them fight. She was more effective even than he had been at sowing the seeds of discontent and ripping apart the very fabric of her previous life.

She knew, always that there would come a day when he no longer needed her. He was reverent, that day, instead of brutal. He was kind instead of cold. The lack of violence instilled a fear in her unlike anything she had ever known. He escorted her, himself, to the place where first they met, and that was where he slit her throat and bid her farewell.

She bared her fangs in a gruesome smile that mimicked the one he had carved in her neck, and kissed him as her life bled away.

This was it: the final vision, the last hallucination. She was home, and happy, and whole. Until the next dream…